Boone, Daniel ( born , c.Nov. 2, 1734 ,Berks Berks County, Pa.—died , c.Sept. 26, 1820 ,St St. Charles, Mo., U.S. ) early American frontiersman and legendary hero who helped blaze a trail through Cumberland Gap, a notch in the Appalachian Mountains near the juncture of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

Boone had little formal schooling but learned to read and write. As a youth he moved with his family (English Quakers) to the North Carolina frontier. Most of his life was spent as a wandering hunter and trapper.

Many white men had traversed Kentucky before Boone; hence, the legend that he was its discoverer needs qualification. Boone first went a short way through Cumberland Gap to hunt in the fall of 1767, and he and several companions returned to Kentucky to trap and hunt in 1769–71. In 1773 Boone undertook to lead his own and several other families to Kentucky, but the group was attacked by Cherokee Indians just beyond the last settlement. Two of the party, including Boone’s son James, were captured, tortured, and murdered, whereupon the survivors turned back.

In March 1775 Boone and 28 companions were employed by Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Company to blaze a trail through Cumberland Gap. The company planned to establish Kentucky as a 14th colony. Despite Indian attacks, the party built the Wilderness Road, which ran from eastern Virginia into the interior of Kentucky and beyond and became the main route to the region then known as the West. It helped make possible the immediate opening of the first settlements in Kentucky: Boonesborough, Harrod’s Town, and Benjamin Logan’s. In August 1775 Boone brought his wife Rebecca and their daughter to Boonesborough. They were, except for a few women who had been captured by Indians, the first white women in Kentucky, and their arrival may be said to mark the first permanent settlement there. The plan to establish the 14th colony failed, however, and Kentucky was made a county of Virginia. Boone became a captain in the county’s militia and a leader in defending Boonesborough against the Indians. He was captured by Indians in 1778 and was adopted as a son by the Shawnee chief, Blackfish. After five months he escaped to warn Boonesborough settlers of an impending attack. When the attack by British soldiers and Indians came (September 1778), the settlement successfully withstood a 10-day siege.

Although a courageous and resourceful leader, Boone did not prosper. He established extensive land claims but could rarely make them good. After the American Revolution he worked as a surveyor along the Ohio River. He settled for a few years in Kanawha County, Va. (now West Virginia). Then, in 1799, he followed his son Daniel Morgan Boone to Missouri, in Louisiana Territory (then belonging to Spain), where he continued to hunt and trap.

A legendary hero even at the time of his death, his fame spread worldwide when in 1823 Lord Byron devoted seven stanzas to him in “Don Juan.”